United States or Saint Barthélemy ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Shells and cannister tore through the Union ranks, making in parts of the line fearful havoc. Thus, for nine long hours, our Sixth corps endured this fiery ordeal, when darkness closed over the field of strife. Meanwhile, on the left, Burnside became hotly engaged. At nine o'clock in the morning, his troops moved down toward the stone bridge, over which they hoped to cross.

From the moment of the general arming, the long gun, which we have already shown to constitute the sole defence of the schooner, was brought nearer to the inshore gang-way, and mounted on its elevated pivot, with its formidable muzzle overtopping and projecting above the low bulwarks, could in an instant be brought to bear on whatever point it might be found advisable to vomit forth its mass of wrath, consisting of grape, cannister, and chain shot.

The red-headed man snarled. But his eyes were on the cannister whose contents should weigh a hundred pounds on Earth. "Any tricks," he rasped, "and you know what happens!" "Yeah," said Pop. He stolidly put his helmet back on. But his eyes went past the red-headed man to the stair that wound down, inside the ship, from some compartment above.

Unlike the "Rum Jar" or "Cannister," which was a home-made article consisting of any old tin filled with explosive, this new bomb was shaped like a shell, fitted with a copper driving band and fired from a rifled mortar. It weighed over 200 lbs., was either two feet two inches or three feet six inches long and nine inches in diameter, and produced on exploding a crater as big as a small mine.

Didn't the old soldiers treat him well? Didn't they seem to yearn for his society?" asked the grocery man, as the boy was making a lunch on some sweet crackers in a tin cannister. "Well, they were not very much mashed on Pa. You see, Pa never gets tired telling us about how he fit in the army.

The enemy kept close to our heels, just as we were rising one hill their batteries would be placed on the one behind, then grape and cannister would sweep the field. There were no thickets, no ravines, no fences to shield or protect us. Everything seemed to have been swept from off the face of the earth, with the exception of a lone farm house here and there.

Now, say, here is Port Arthur, by this barrel of dried apples, and there is Mushapata, by the ax handle barrel, see?" "Well, you and I are just alike," said the boy. "Let's have a sham battle, right here in the grocery. Get down that can of powder." "'Taint against the law, is it?" said the old man as he handed down a tin cannister of powder.

There was the mine, for example. In each two Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony nearly filled up a three-gallon cannister with greasy-seeming white crystals shaped like two pyramids base to base. The filled cannister would weigh a hundred pounds on Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But on Earth its contents would be computed in carats, and a hundred pounds was worth millions.

The gunboats, which were supplied with an armament of very heavy guns, sending immense shell shrieking and bursting over our heads as they were hurled into the lines of the enemy, the forts on our right and left keeping up an incessant roar, a stream of fire belching from the hot throats of Hoke's forty-two pieces in our front, the comet-like trail of fire from his shells as they hurried on their mission of death towards us, the rattle of grape and cannister as they were hurled against the wooden buildings in our rear, or the woodwork of the forts and earthworks along the line, the loud bray of an immense number of mules, with which Hoke's artillery was supplied, the groans and shrieks of the wounded, combined to give me such a picture of "grim visaged war" as I had never before beheld.

His reproductions of that talk are often intensely realistic. Nearly every book has its chorus of human grotesques whose mere names are a source of mirth. William Worm, Grandfer Cantle, 'Corp'el' Tullidge, Christopher Coney, John Upjohn, Robert Creedle, Martin Cannister, Haymoss Fry, Robert Lickpan, and Sammy Blore, men so denominated should stand for comic things, and these men do.